Most people interested by linguistics and/or conlangs know by now both about Toki Pona, a minilang of some 123 words, and about NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) ...
Some people have already tried out the map the Toki Pona root words on the about 65 primes of NSM.
Other people have tried to match Toki Pona with the about 200 concept on the Swadesh word list.
Presumably, someone has already undertaken to translate the BASIC English 850 word list in Toki Pona ... if that's you, please let me know ASAP !
Anyway at the moment I write this, it should be clear that the idea of using the Toki Pona language with eventually some extra roots as the basis for language analysis by circumventing the Globish English tendancies of modern llinguistics ...
It would also prevent to make strange English circonlucations that are only of semi-valid grammaticality ...
The English words used for the concepts of NSM are called 'exponents' and they only happen to be in English, they could as well be Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, German or even Blissymbols... so way not use Toki Pona exponents ?
BASIC English has shown its capacity of defining English words, NSM on the other hand has been used to define the first level of a multilayer non-circular English dictionary ...
Minimal English and Globish have been noticed worldwide ...
But circumlocations as "the child of the brother of my mother" are clearly not really English standard language use while "jan lili pi jan sama mije pi mama meli mi" is PERFECT TOKI PONA.
have a nice day ! o jo e tenpo suno pona !
Pieter Jansegers jan Pite Janseke
Comments
September 16, 2018 14:30
This is the reason I would add "pesa" (piece, part) and kuju (form, shape) to Toki Pona ...
the first one because the concept is already a NSM prime and the second one because shape has been added to NSM for making the multitlayer dictionary ..
like they've added "tentative semantic primes (colour, number and shape)" [1]
[1] see http://learnthesewordsfirst.com/about/research-behind-the-dictionary.html